uncle!

I have officially given up on my back yard. That monster is way too much for me to handle on my own. So I called in the Big Boys.

Okay, so it's a guy who was in my master gardener class, and who is a landscape designer, and who is pretty well known around here for his beautiful rock work ("natural boulder placement") and who has long been a student of Japanese garden design. He was here yesterday and he's got some wonderful ideas. (hobbitt is really quite excited about it, too. And not just because he won't have to be doing the digging or carting. Really.)

He'll be coming back with a model (not a sketch, but a model) of his plans. They will no doubt require large pieces of machinery to bring in the boulders ("Well, I think a nice three-ton piece would look really good as a focal point over here!") and other materials. So I'll have to move a good deal of this year's plantings from out front, and beg a neighbor to let us destroy a small part of his (neglected, unmown) front lawn.

This means, of course, that there's no boat in my immediate future. I don't know where the money is going to come from for this project, but I do know that getting it done will do everything - and I do mean everything - for my attitude about the yard.